in my view the ultimate foolishness of this sort was bringing Cessna Aircraft to it's knees by sueing them on behalf of people who crashed because of their inability to handle the airplane in the conditions into which they put themselves. -paul

From cypherpunks-errors@toad.com Thu Aug 1 18:32:44 1996 Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 10:39:12 -0700 X-Sender: tcmay@mail.got.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset="us-ascii"> To: cypherpunks@toad.com From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) Subject: Blurring the Chains of Causation Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Content-Length: 4559

An unusual thread name, "Blurring the Chains of Causation."

What I mean is this:

- the U.S. legal system has been blurring, or confusing, the chain of cause-and-effect in crimes

- Example: allowing suits by insurance companies and states against tobacco companies. A smoker gets cancer by his actions, and it used to be that this was his action, his responsibility. Now, we hold tobacco companies liable, and perhaps will someday hold executives of these companies criminally liable. (This for a product which is not illegal, mind you.)

(There are a bunch of related examples. "Civil liability" is a major way this blurring is happening. Gun manufacturers being sued for crimes committed with their guns, ladder makers sued by the families of criminals who leaned ladders up against electrified fences, and so on. How long before a bookstore is sued for "allowing" a book to be bought by someone who later is "inspired" to commit a crime--actually, John Grisham ("The Firm") is involved in a lawsuit against Oliver Stone for his film, "Natural Born Killers," which Grisham claims "inspired" a murder. This has got to stop, in my opinion.)

- "They made me do it" defenses. Hostess Twinkies are implicated in the brutal murder of San Francisco's mayor and a city councilman. Childhood abuse is exculpatory in other cases. Psychobabblers blather about what caused people to behave as they did. A mass murderer says pornography made him kill 25 women. A lawyer claims his client's son committed suicide after listening to heavy metal music. And so it goes.

This blurring has links to cryptography, bomb-making instructions on the Net, availability of porn on the Net, and many other things.

To cut to the chase:

- a librarian who "allows" a person to check out "The Anarchist Cookbook" is *not* causing a crime, though much of the rhetoric one hears is otherwise.

- the _author_ of that book (Powell, allegedly) is *also* not causing a crime.

- the _publishers_ of that book (Lyle Stuart, as I recall--my copy is not handy) also have not committed any crime

To make things clear, some of the language being proposed in the rush-to-law about anti-terrorism, wiretapping, anti-encryption, etc. As Sen. Feinstein puts it, "We hope we can wrap up the repeal of the Bill of Rights and have it on President Clinton's desk before the close of the Olympics on Sunday." :-(

- if I _advocate_ strong crytography, avoidance of taxes, undermining of government power, crypto anarchy, etc., I have not committed any crime (Caveat: advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government apparently is a crime, as are certain forms of conspiracy, a la RICO, tax evasion, etc.)

- if I _use_ strong cryptography, I have not committed any crime, ipso facto, nor am I necessarily conspiring to commit any crime

And so on.

Many of the proposed restrictions seek to further blur this chain of causation, by making someone who provides access to materials which _may_ later be used in a crime, or which may "inspire" someone to crime, a kind of criminal.

The trend picked up steam with the "deep pockets" precedents in the 70s (*), was fed by the blame-passing psychobabble of the same decade, and has now reached its present state by a willingness of the courts to hear such cases.

People who actually commit real crimes are the criminals, not those who sold them Hostess Twinkies without first checking their blood sugar level. Not those who let a library patron look at a "dangerous" book. And not those who provided strong cryptographic tools which _might_ be used by terrorists, pedophiles, and money launderers.

--Tim May

(* "deep pockets" -- If there are N parties in a lawsuit, and one of them shares only 5% of the (putative) blame but has 95% of the overall assets, go after the party with the "deepest pockets." This forced Cessna and Piper, the leading light aircraft firms at one time, to stop selling light aircraft. The example with Oliver Stone being sued is a clear case of this.)

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."